“Eyah, I understand.” He sat beside her. “Your mind gets so riled up, neh? Ties itself to knots. Before a battle… it’s always the same.” He pulled off the wooden sheath, and the long blade flickered in the moonlight.
“It may snow tomorrow,” he said. “Those clouds. At the very least it’ll be an icy fog. Perhaps that’s better.” He chuckled with grim humor and began to polish the blade.
“Well,” he said, with typical understatement, “there might be fighting. Are you ready?”
She couldn’t answer. She was awash with the sudden, intruding thought of how she had killed those people who’d attacked Sen, how the god took over and unleashed something in her, something evil, how they’d made her into a killer once again.That’s all you are…She wanted to cry. She wanted to give up. She felt she would never get it off, the stain of it, the feeling in her bones. Instead, she simply asked, “Teacher… how do I find out what they want me to do? The Hososhi. How do Iknow?”
“Sometimes you never know.” He sighed. “Sometimes, there aren’t any answers. Twelve years I spent studying the precepts of the Middle Path. Twelve years of training and abstinence and peace. And now I have to accept that there will be blood on these old hands again. Such is life. I don’t like it, but such is life. The god brought you here because this is where it will happen. The warriors, the prince, they’re all here. Their war will begin. And the demon will come.” He turned to her, sudden andfocused. “We must not let her take them, Rui. When the time comes… We must not let this go on.”
“I wish there was something we could change,” she said.
“So do we all,” he said. “So does your friend.”
Rui thought about that, glancing down the well. “Do you think he’s happy?”
“Happy?” He nearly laughed. “There’s about to be a war, no one’shappy.”
“I meant, he has what he wanted now, he has his family.”
“They are not his family,” said Jobo, voice low. “Sen doesn’t want to hear it, but he has to understand thatfamilyis not your blood. It’s more than that. I know what it looks like from where you are, believe me. But people are just… people. They contradict themselves. They go the opposite way from what they really want. Sometimes they push it away. Everyone does. Everyone does things that confuse them later, that don’t make sense, and they try to rationalize why they did what they did, but the truth is, sometimes we have to accept it. We make mistakes. You can give all of yourself to someone. You can move apart. When you reach my age, you’ll have people who you’re connected to so deep it’s in your bones, and your spirit is in line with theirs – even if they’re gone. Even if they move away. Two bodies, one heart. That little part of you is theirs for ever. And likely, that little part of them belongs to you.”
“But sometimes things just die,” she said. “Sometimes, I think all the gods ever did was show me what was already inside me. Like a curse in my blood. I was cursed the moment Yora found me in that house with Sen… cursed for ever.”
“The teachers say, only by meeting the evil inside you can you understand that you’ll never be rid of it,” he offered. “That is the only way to finally become free.”
“But I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know how.” The tears were threatening her again, and she hated them. “I need someone to show me.”
His eyes twinkled, like stars.
“You know,” he said, gazing softly at her with those shining eyes. “No matter how much one has – how much wisdom, how much insight, how much faith – a teacher can only teach what they know. That means there comes a day when you must rid yourself of them. Let go. Of your conceptions. Of your fears. And of the teachings themselves. They hold you back. Then you may move on.
“The masters say, ‘When you cross a river, make sure you leave your boat behind.’ A boat may help you once, maybe even save your life. Butonce you’ve reached another shore? You no longer need it. Don’t carry your raft with you everywhere you go.”
Late that night, she found herself watching the rock-running water of the river once again. The air grew brittle in the cold, the sound of the current rose like music, and she thought she saw a lantern on the other side.There must be monks there, she thought,finishing their tasks.
Everything sharpened, crystalline, in her ears: the wet night turning to rain, the soft shifting of the water, the sound of ice, thetink-clinkof the builders and the bamboo walls.
I’m here, Rui thought.I came, just like you asked. You wanted me here, Hososhi. But now that I am, there will be a war. I’ll be useless in a war.These monks and lords are warriors, I’m surrounded by them, but I have nothing I’m supposed to do.
She walked, awash with feeling. The smell of the river rose around her, mixed with frost that had lingered through the day; wet soil, pale dying grasses, reeds. At the far end of the bridge, someone was singing. Soft, a child’s song. Rui squinted through the darkness, moved inexorably toward the bridge and the flicker of the torches there, and the strange voice with its lonely melody on the other side.
Her ears rang slightly. She wasn’t sure if what she heard was real, or a specter, or something else. It could have been the wind.
She pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders and walked across the bridge. They would cut the planks when fighting started, dismantle half the span so the Keishi couldn’t get across; Yora Shijin said they’d move to the far side, but slowly, and hold the enemy at the crossing, and give the rest of them a fighting chance.
Now Rui stood on the bridge alone, with the night and the water below her feet, and the singing ghost she heard on the eastern shore. On the other side she found a small grassy area not unlike the lawn she’d walked with Jobo. The temples had wide, sloping rooftops lined with tile, wooden prayer-gates at every entrance. It felt strangely abandoned now; everyone had gone to the western end to help with the defense. She passed a courtyard, two cherry trees standing leafless in the cold.
What am I supposed to do?she asked inwardly, again.
I did what you wanted. I made it to the wells. The prince is here. Is that what you wanted? For me to meet him? For me to help? What am I supposed to do now?
No answer but thin sibilance of wind on the eaves, and the trickle of water over stone. “Please,” she said. The god in her heart remained silent.For a hopeful moment, she wondered if they were gone for good, if she was free. But she couldn’t be. She hadn’t done what the Hososhi wanted. She hadn’t fulfilled her role.I have a use for you, they said.You are mine…
The wind whipped past, billowing across the courtyard, around her ankles, sharp as ice. Above, clouds tilted over the earth, making shadows, skeletal, and thin.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “What do you want me to do?”
But the wind fluttered off. The god wasn’t there.
